Letters from an American
“The Republican Party’s new favorite talking point is calling Democrats communists,” Representative Jim McGovern (D-MA) said yesterday on the floor of the U.S. House of Representatives.
“Really? Communists? Did we accidentally step into a time machine?”
“I get it,” he said. “They don’t want to talk about the real issues, the bread and butter issues. They don’t want to talk about affordability. I guess my question is, is Joe McCarthy back from the dead? Because it sounds like that’s who wrote all the garbage coming from Republicans, about communism. These guys, they dust off the same, tired, old talking points, every time they’re backed into a corner. Every time a new poll comes out saying that your economic agenda sucks, what they do is they change the subject. They try to divert attention. It is pathetic.
“But fine. They…want to play that game, let’s play that game. Let’s talk about the Republican Party. A party that worships one man above the Constitution in a cult of personality. A party that demonizes immigrants and says they poison the blood of our country. A party that calls the free press the enemy of the people and sics the Justice Department on journalists who they don’t like. A party that says their political opponents are internal enemies and calls them, quote, the enemy within. A party that is okay with invading our allies, including other democracies, a party that punishes their political opponents, that has deployed troops on our own streets, that wants to use the American military on the American people. A party that believes any unhinged lie, fantasy, and conspiracy theory as long as it comes from one man. A party that tries to lock up members of Congress for exercising their free speech rights. And a party that has tried to violently overthrow the results of a free and fair election in the United States of America. A party that, in fact, pardoned everyone who invaded this building on January 6, 2021, and tried to throw out the votes of millions of Americans because the president couldn’t accept that he lost.
“How dare that party lecture anyone? How dare they talk about communism when their own party has totally lost touch, not just with the founding ideals of this country, but lost touch with reality itself. So if we’re gonna start assigning political labels based on conduct, then let’s call things by their proper names. The Republican Party has become the party of fascism, full stop. You know, they have become a party of far right fascists who are hell-bent on destroying our country and our way of life. And every single time they call us communists, it is nothing more than a projection of their own… radicalization.
“They don’t want to talk about that, and they definitely don’t want to talk about their higher grocery prices, or skyrocketing gas prices, or higher inflation, or the cost of health care, or their new, endless, illegal war. It has now cost over $100 billion. So instead, they scream and they yell because they have nothing else left to offer.”
“Democrats are patriots who love this country enough to fight for it. We are fighting to make it easier for people to afford groceries. We’re fighting to try to make it easier for people to afford rent, prescription drugs, and health care. And we will not be lectured by a fascist Republican party that offers the American people nothing but lies, fear, endless culture wars, and tax breaks for billionaires.”
The political ideology called fascism grew out of World War I, when former socialist Benito Mussolini rejected the equality that defined democracy and came to believe that a few leaders must take a nation toward progress by directing the actions of the rest. These men must organize the people as they had been organized during wartime, ruthlessly suppressing all opposition and directing the economy so that businessmen and politicians worked together. And, logically, that select group of leaders would elevate a single man, who would become an all-powerful dictator. To weld their followers into an efficient machine, they demonized opponents into an “other” that their followers could hate.
This theory drove the Axis powers during World War II, and in 1945, the United States War Department explained to U.S. Army personnel in the European theater of World War II what fascism was. The government focused less on the ideology of fascism than on its practical outcome.
Fascism, the pamphlet Army Talks explained, “is government by the few and for the few. The objective is seizure and control of the economic, political, social, and cultural life of the state.” “The people run democratic governments, but fascist governments run the people.”
“The basic principles of democracy stand in the way of their desires; hence—democracy must go! Anyone who is not a member of their inner gang has to do what he’s told. They permit no civil liberties, no equality before the law.” “Fascism treats women as mere breeders. ‘Children, kitchen, and the church,’ was the Nazi slogan for women,” the pamphlet said.
Fascists “make their own rules and change them when they choose…. They maintain themselves in power by use of force combined with propaganda based on primitive ideas of ‘blood’ and ‘race,’ by skillful manipulation of fear and hate, and by false promise of security. The propaganda glorifies war and insists it is smart and ‘realistic’ to be pitiless and violent.”
After the war, scholars like Eric Hoffer studied the societal conditions necessary for fascism to take hold. In his 1951 The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements, Hoffer noted that demagogues needed a disaffected population whose members felt they had lost the power they previously held, that they had been displaced either religiously, economically, culturally, or politically. Such people were willing to follow a leader who promised to return them to their former positions of prominence and thus to make the nation great again. But to cement their loyalty, the leader had to give them someone to hate. Who that was didn’t really matter: the group simply had to be blamed for all the troubles the leader’s supporters were suffering.
More recently, scholars are adding to our understanding of fascism by describing it as a form of political behavior. “It is,” Robert O. Paxton says in his 2005 The Anatomy of Fascism, “marked by obsessive preoccupation with community decline, humiliation, or victimhood and by compensatory cults of unity, energy, and purity, in which a mass-based party of committed nationalist militants, working in uneasy but effective collaboration with traditional elites, abandons democratic liberties and pursues with redemptive violence and without ethical or legal restraints goals of internal cleansing and external expansion.”
McGovern’s condemnation of today’s Republicans fits these descriptions even without the parallels noted by Carrie Kaufman in her You’re Overthinking It with Carrie Kaufman between leading Republican officials and Nazi leaders. On July 19, Kaufman showed how recent speeches by Secretary of State Marco Rubio and deputy White House chief of staff Stephen Miller at last Thursday’s State Department about “Left-wing terrorism” echoed Adolph Hitler’s Mein Kampf and Heinrich Himmler’s 1942 pamphlet Der Untermensch, or “The Subhuman.”
But McGovern left a key element of fascism out of his speech yesterday: the alignment between the government and favored businesses. Fascism subordinates business activity to the needs of the government. In exchange for supporting them, government officials award massive government contracts and subsidies to favored businesses, and protect them from regulation.
Earlier this year, the administration established a new “Economic Defense Unit” (EDU) at the Pentagon, charged with investing public money in defense industries. Ana Swanson of the New York Times reported in March that the Pentagon was recruiting Wall Street investment bankers to the team to spend up to $200 billion in government investment over the next three years. That access, recruiters told prospective employees, would give them “access to fund-raising channels that include royal families and foreign sovereign contacts” in case they ever wanted to raise money for their own investment firms.
And the U.S. government under Trump has taken ownership shares of private companies it considers important to national security, like Intel, for example, and U.S. Steel. In November of 2025, Swanson reported in the New York Times that the administration had already committed more than $10 billion in taxpayer funds to favored businesses. The lack of transparency in this interference in the private sector raised concerns about favoritism, corruption, and the distortion of the market.
Last night, Michael R. Gordon and Stephen Kalin of the Wall Street Journal broke the story that Trump has approved a landmark 30-year deal to provide Saudi Arabia with a civilian nuclear program. The deal gives U.S. companies a monopoly on developing a nuclear infrastructure for the Arab country, but it does not include monitoring and inspections by the International Atomic Energy Agency to make sure nuclear fuel isn’t enriched for a nuclear weapon.
The idea of building nuclear power plants in Saudi Arabia was central to Trump’s 2016 bid for office. Members of Trump’s inner circle, including his son-in-law Jared Kushner and disgraced national security advisor Michael Flynn, hatched a plan for a joint U.S.-Russian project to build nuclear power plants in Saudi Arabia. In June 2016 they formed a company called IP3 International, short for International Peace, Power and Prosperity.
In Trump’s first term, White House ethics officials and members of the National Security Council warned that selling nuclear technology to Saudi Arabia could violate the Atomic Energy Act. Members of the administration continued to work on the project, nonetheless.
This week’s deal is worth billions of dollars in contracts for U.S. firms that work in nuclear technology, particularly Westinghouse, which filed for bankruptcy in 2017 when its nuclear technology took longer to build and was more expensive than the company estimated. In June, the Department of Energy announced it was investing $17.5 billion in loans to Westinghouse and local utility and energy companies to build 10 large-scale commercial nuclear reactors across the U.S.
The deal is “a big win for the U.S. commercially and geopolitically, enriching American firms and tying Saudi Arabia closer to the U.S.,” Kristin Diwan, a senior resident scholar at the Arab Gulf States Institute, a research organization in Washington, D.C., told Vivian Nereim of the New York Times. It is also a win for Saudi Arabia’s crown prince Mohammed bin Salman (MBS), who has vowed that he will build a nuclear weapon if Iran does, making the deal a blow to nuclear nonproliferation.
Fascism has always been a vehicle for frustration with a system that was failing the people. But it has never been a solution for fixing that system.
